Waco

What began as a federal raid to serve a search warrant ended, fifty-one days later, with seventy-six people dead in a burning building in the Texas scrubland. The Waco siege is one of those events whose facts are agreed upon and whose meaning still is not. This is the full account: who the Branch Davidians were, what happened during those fifty-one days, what the investigations later concluded, and why a remote piece of land outside a small Texas city is still arguably the most consequential single law-enforcement operation in modern American history.

Part One: The Adventists Who Did Not Stop

The story of Waco begins, properly, in the 1930s. The Seventh-day Adventist Church — a Protestant denomination that grew out of 19th-century American millennialism — emphasised, among other things, a belief that the end of the world was both near and predictable from careful study of biblical prophecy. In 1929, a Bulgarian-born Adventist named Victor Houteff began publishing a tract called The Shepherd’s Rod, which argued that the church had grown complacent about the imminence of the apocalypse. He was expelled from the mainstream Adventists in 1934 and founded what eventually came to be known as the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists, named for the biblical King David from whose line the Messiah was prophesied to return.

In 1935, Houteff and a small group of followers established a community on a piece of land near Waco, Texas, which they called Mount Carmel after the biblical mountain where the prophet Elijah had confronted the priests of Baal. The community lived simply, farmed, awaited the end times, and largely kept to itself. When Houteff died in 1955, his widow Florence assumed leadership and predicted a specific date for the apocalypse — 22 April 1959. When the date came and went without incident, the movement fractured.

Out of the fracture came the Branch Davidians, a splinter group led by a former member named Benjamin Roden. The Branch Davidians retained the Mount Carmel property after a long legal battle, and after Roden’s death in 1978 leadership passed to his widow Lois. By the early 1980s, Lois Roden was an elderly woman searching for a successor and a successor was, as it turned out, on his way.

Part Two: Vernon Howell Becomes David Koresh

Vernon Wayne Howell was born on 17 August 1959 in Houston, Texas, to a fourteen-year-old unmarried mother named Bonnie Clark. His father, a man named Bobby Howell, was nineteen and not interested in fatherhood. Bonnie left the boy with her parents and went on with her life. Vernon was, by his own later account, a difficult child — dyslexic, isolated, mocked at school, and increasingly absorbed in religion as he grew older.

By his late teens he had memorised vast portions of the Bible. He moved to Tyler, Texas, joined his mother’s Seventh-day Adventist church, and was eventually disfellowshipped for what the elders described as a bad influence on the young people of the congregation. In 1981, at twenty-two, he made his way to Mount Carmel.

What happened over the next several years would, in retrospect, be recognised as a fairly typical pattern of cultic succession. Howell impressed Lois Roden with his apparent command of scripture. He became her sexual partner, despite the age gap of nearly half a century. He began teaching at the community. When Lois’s son George Roden challenged him for control of Mount Carmel — a conflict that at one point involved Howell and seven followers being charged with attempted murder after a 1987 shootout — Howell eventually emerged as the undisputed leader of the Branch Davidians.

In 1990, he legally changed his name to David Koresh. David, for the biblical king. Koresh, the Hebrew name for the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great, who in the Book of Isaiah is described as God’s anointed instrument. The choice was theologically deliberate. Koresh was telling his followers, and himself, what he believed he was.

Part Three: The Theology and the Abuses

It is impossible to understand what happened at Waco without understanding what Koresh taught and what he did. The two were entangled in ways that, even now, some of his surviving followers continue to defend and others continue to grieve.

The core of Koresh’s theology was the Book of Revelation, and specifically the figure of the Lamb who alone could open the Seven Seals of the apocalyptic scroll. Koresh, in a series of escalating revelations to his followers through the late 1980s, came to claim that he himself was that Lamb — not Christ returned, exactly, but a final messianic figure whose role was to interpret prophecy in the closing days of the world. His followers were the saints who would reign with him. The outside world — the federal government in particular — was Babylon.

From this theological framework Koresh derived two practical doctrines that came to define the community. First, the Branch Davidians needed to prepare physically for the apocalypse, which meant stockpiling food, supplies, and weapons. Mount Carmel became, by the early 1990s, a heavily armed compound with a significant cache of firearms — some legally purchased, some converted to automatic fire in apparent violation of federal law, which would become the basis for the eventual ATF raid.

Second, and more disturbing, Koresh issued what he called the New Light doctrine in 1989. Only he, as the messianic figure, was permitted to procreate within the community. All other marriages were annulled. The women — including the wives of his most loyal male followers — were declared his alone. He took multiple “spiritual wives” and fathered at least twelve children with them. Several of these wives were under the legal age of consent. One was twelve years old.

This is the part of the Waco story that has been, at times, uncomfortably soft-pedalled in retellings that emphasise the federal overreach narrative. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the raid, Koresh was, by the standards of any modern legal system and by the testimony of survivors who later left the movement, sexually abusing children. The Texas Department of Human Services had opened multiple investigations into allegations of child abuse at Mount Carmel through the early 1990s. None had produced charges, in part because the children inside the compound were inaccessible to investigators and in part because the legal threshold for action was difficult to meet.

This was the situation, in early 1993, when federal attention shifted from Texas social services to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Part Four: The ATF Investigation

The ATF had been investigating the Branch Davidians since the summer of 1992 on suspicion of illegal weapons modifications — specifically, the conversion of semi-automatic AR-15 rifles into fully automatic machine guns, which requires a federal licence the Davidians did not have. A local UPS driver had reported the delivery of suspicious packages to Mount Carmel including hand grenades and inert grenade casings. Surveillance was established. An undercover agent named Robert Rodriguez was inserted into the community, posing as a college student interested in Koresh’s teachings.

By February 1993, the ATF had sufficient evidence to seek a federal search warrant for the compound and an arrest warrant for Koresh. The question was how to execute them.

Koresh, in fact, left the compound regularly. He went into Waco for supplies. He jogged on the road outside Mount Carmel most mornings. He had been interviewed cooperatively by the local sheriff in 1992 when a previous custody dispute had brought him to law enforcement attention. Any number of arrests could have been made quietly, without the use of force, away from the women and children at the compound.

The ATF chose instead to plan a dynamic entry — a heavily armed raid by approximately seventy-five agents, supported by helicopters, intended to overwhelm the compound before resistance could be organised. The reasons for this choice have been argued about ever since. Critics inside and outside the agency have pointed to the political pressure on the ATF in early 1993, which was facing congressional budget hearings and badly needed a high-profile success. Supporters of the decision have argued that the compound’s known weapons cache made a discreet approach genuinely dangerous to the agents involved. Both things may have been true at once.

The raid was scheduled for the morning of 28 February 1993. It had one critical assumption: that the Davidians would not know they were coming.

Part Five: 28 February

That assumption collapsed before the raid began. A local television reporter from KWTX-TV, tipped off about the operation, had been driving around the area looking for the compound. He stopped a passing postal worker to ask directions. The postal worker happened to be David Jones, David Koresh’s brother-in-law, who returned immediately to Mount Carmel and told Koresh what he had seen.

The undercover agent Robert Rodriguez was inside the compound that morning, conducting what he believed was a routine Bible study with Koresh. He noticed Koresh receive a phone call, then return visibly shaken. Rodriguez has said in subsequent interviews that Koresh told him, in essence, “I know they’re coming. I know they’re coming.” Rodriguez excused himself and left, made it to the ATF command post, and reported that the element of surprise was lost. He pleaded with his commanders to call off the raid.

The raid commanders went ahead anyway. The reasons given, in subsequent investigations, were a mix of momentum, sunk cost, and a belief that the operation could still succeed. It is one of the most consequential operational decisions in modern American law enforcement, and it was almost certainly the wrong one.

At 9:45 a.m., the ATF agents arrived at Mount Carmel in cattle trailers, intending to approach the building from two sides while three helicopters provided a distraction from the rear. As they moved toward the front door, gunfire began. Who fired first is one of the unresolvable disputes of the Waco case. The ATF maintained that the Davidians opened up first, from inside the building. Surviving Davidians have insisted that the agents fired first, including from the helicopters. Audio recordings from the day are inconclusive.

What is not in dispute is what happened next. A gun battle lasting approximately ninety minutes left four ATF agents dead — Conway LeBleu, Todd McKeehan, Robert Williams, and Steven Willis — and sixteen wounded. Inside the compound, five Branch Davidians were killed in the firefight. A sixth, Michael Schroeder, was shot dead later that afternoon while attempting to return to Mount Carmel from outside. Koresh himself was wounded, hit in the side and the wrist.

A ceasefire was negotiated by telephone. The ATF withdrew. The FBI was called in. The siege had begun.

Part Six: The Fifty-One Days

By the morning of 1 March, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had taken operational control. Negotiators began round-the-clock telephone contact with Koresh and his second-in-command, Steve Schneider. Approximately 900 federal law enforcement personnel eventually established a perimeter around the compound. Reporters from around the world set up in a media camp a few miles away. The siege would play out on televisions across America for the next seven weeks.

In the early days, negotiations seemed to make progress. On 1 March, in exchange for Koresh’s pre-recorded religious message being broadcast on national radio, ten children were released from the compound. Over the following weeks, a further fourteen children and several adults would come out. But Koresh, after the broadcast, informed negotiators that God had instructed him to wait inside the building rather than surrender. The promises of imminent surrender that he made repeatedly across the seven weeks — always tied to the completion of some new theological task, most often a written explanation of the Seven Seals — were never kept.

The negotiation strategy and the tactical posture of the FBI presence were, from very early on, in tension. The negotiators wanted patience, time, and the building of rapport. The tactical commanders, particularly Hostage Rescue Team commander Richard Rogers, wanted escalating pressure to force a resolution. Through March and April, the tactical view increasingly prevailed. Floodlights were trained on the compound at night. Loudspeakers blasted recordings of Tibetan chants, dental drills, screaming rabbits, and Christmas music to deprive the Davidians of sleep. Armoured vehicles crushed the cars in the parking area. Electricity was cut off.

Whether these tactics helped or hurt the eventual outcome is one of the questions later investigations would labour over. The Davidians’ apocalyptic worldview cast the FBI as Babylon, the enemy whose siege would precede the end times. Each tactical escalation was, from inside the building, evidence that the prophecy was being fulfilled. The negotiators, when they read transcripts later, described watching the religious framework of the people inside hardening in real time as the pressure grew.

Two outside parties were eventually allowed in. The lawyers Dick DeGuerin (representing Koresh) and Jack Zimmermann (representing Schneider) visited Mount Carmel multiple times in late March and early April and reported back that they believed a negotiated surrender was genuinely possible if the FBI would allow time, particularly time for Koresh to complete his written exegesis of the Seven Seals. By 14 April, Koresh had communicated through his lawyers that he was working on the document and would surrender once it was finished.

The FBI tactical command, by that point, had lost patience. Believing Koresh was stalling, and concerned about the health of the children inside, they began making the case to Washington for a tear gas assault.

Part Seven: 19 April

Attorney General Janet Reno had been in office for less than a month. She was briefed on the proposed plan multiple times over the second week of April. She was told, among other things, that children inside the compound were being beaten, that conditions were deteriorating, that there was credible concern about mass suicide if the situation continued, and that the Hostage Rescue Team could not sustain its operational tempo indefinitely. She authorised the plan on 17 April.

The plan, as approved, was for armoured combat engineering vehicles to punch holes in the walls of the main building and pump in CS gas — a powerful tear gas — over a period of approximately forty-eight hours, with the aim of forcing the Davidians to come out. The plan explicitly anticipated that the gassing could last days. It also explicitly stated that no incendiary devices would be used.

At 6 a.m. on 19 April 1993, the operation began. Combat engineering vehicles approached the compound and began to insert gas through breached walls. Negotiators announced over loudspeakers that the gassing was not an assault, that the Davidians should come out peacefully, that no-one would be harmed. No-one came out. The CS gas, in the cold morning air with a strong Texas wind, did not concentrate effectively in the building.

For six hours the operation continued. More vehicles. More gas. More announcements. Inside the compound, the Davidians did what they had drilled to do: they put gas masks on and gathered in the central concrete chapel, where the children were sheltering. The wind kept rising.

At approximately 12:07 p.m., fires broke out in the compound. They appeared, on the FBI’s surveillance footage and on the live television broadcasts that millions of Americans were watching, to start in at least three different locations almost simultaneously. Within minutes, the wooden building — dry, wind-fed, full of accelerants in the form of lantern fuel and stored gasoline — was fully engulfed.

Nine Davidians ran out of the burning building and were taken into custody. Seventy-six did not. Among the dead was David Koresh, killed by a single gunshot wound to the forehead, the precise circumstances of which remain disputed — whether self-inflicted or administered by another Davidian. Twenty-five of the dead were children, several of whom were Koresh’s own.

Part Eight: Who Started the Fire

The question of how the fire began has been argued for more than thirty years and will probably never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

The official conclusion of multiple investigations — the Department of the Treasury’s 1993 report, the Department of Justice’s 1993 report, and most authoritatively the 2000 report by former senator John Danforth, appointed as special counsel after the 1999 revelation that the FBI had used some pyrotechnic tear gas canisters earlier in the day — was that the fire was set by the Branch Davidians themselves. The Danforth report cited audio surveillance from inside the compound on which Davidians can be heard discussing pouring fuel and starting fires shortly before the blazes broke out. It cited the simultaneous origin of the fires in three different parts of the building, consistent with deliberate ignition rather than accidental spread. And it cited the testimony of the surviving Davidians, several of whom acknowledged that fuel had been spread inside the building.

The critics’ view, which has been advanced in documentaries, books, and online communities continuously since 1993, is that the FBI’s tactical operation either deliberately or negligently caused the fire. The 1999 revelation that pyrotechnic CS canisters had been fired earlier in the day — after years of FBI denials that any incendiary devices had been used — fuelled this view considerably, even though the Danforth investigation eventually concluded that those canisters had been fired hours before the fire began and at a separate, water-filled bunker. Some critics point to forward-looking infrared video shot from FBI surveillance aircraft on the day, which conspiracy theorists have argued shows automatic weapons fire from federal agents into the burning building. The Danforth report addressed this footage in detail and concluded that the flashes shown were sun glints on debris, not gunfire — an analysis the FBI commissioned an independent simulation to verify.

The most defensible reading of the documentary record is that the Branch Davidians started the fire, that the FBI’s tactical operation created the conditions in which that decision was made, and that both things can be true at once without absolving either party of its share of the catastrophe. The Davidians chose, in the final hours, the apocalyptic ending Koresh had prepared them for. The FBI chose, in the days leading up to it, a tactical posture that made that ending more likely.

Part Nine: The Investigations

The Waco siege produced more government investigation than perhaps any single law enforcement operation in American history. The Treasury Department reported on the ATF raid in September 1993, concluding that the raid commanders had been negligent in pressing ahead after the loss of surprise. Two ATF officials were initially fired, then quietly reinstated. The Justice Department’s October 1993 report largely defended the FBI’s conduct during the siege itself while criticising aspects of the planning. Congressional hearings in 1995 produced thousands of pages of testimony but few binding conclusions.

The most thorough investigation was the Danforth special counsel’s report of 2000. It concluded that the federal government did not start the fire, did not shoot at the Davidians on 19 April, and did not engage in the kind of conscious wrongdoing that the most aggressive critics had alleged. It did not address, because it was not asked to, the broader question of whether the operation as a whole had been wise. That question has been answered, more or less unanimously, in the negative by every serious historian who has examined it since.

Janet Reno, who as Attorney General bore ultimate responsibility for the 19 April operation, said publicly within weeks that she regretted authorising it. She continued to defend the legality and the intent of the decision, but the regret was real and never seems to have left her. In her 2016 obituary, the Waco operation was the first thing the major American newspapers mentioned.

Part Ten: The Long Shadow

The events at Waco did not end on 19 April 1993. In some ways, their consequences are still unfolding now.

In the immediate aftermath, a young army veteran named Timothy McVeigh travelled to Waco during the siege and was photographed at the perimeter, handing out anti-government literature. He had been radicalised by an earlier federal incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, where the wife and son of a separatist named Randy Weaver had been killed by federal agents during a smaller standoff. Waco confirmed everything McVeigh believed about the federal government. He began to plan.

On 19 April 1995 — exactly two years to the day after the Mount Carmel fire — McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 168 people, including nineteen children at a daycare centre on the second floor. McVeigh, when arrested, was wearing a T-shirt that read FBI — Federal Bureau of Incineration. At his trial, and in interviews before his execution in 2001, he was explicit: the Oklahoma City bombing was retaliation for Waco.

The broader American militia movement, which had been a fringe phenomenon before 1993, grew rapidly through the mid-1990s with Waco as its founding grievance. A video called Waco: The Big Lie, produced by the militia attorney Linda Thompson, circulated widely on the conspiracy circuit. The siege became foundational to a generation of anti-government activists, talk radio hosts, and online communities. Alex Jones, who in 1996 organised efforts to rebuild a chapel on the Mount Carmel site, has cited Waco as the central radicalising event of his career.

The line from Waco to Oklahoma City to the militia movement of the 1990s to the broader patriot and sovereign citizen movements of the 2000s and 2010s is not the only thread that runs through American domestic extremism in the decades since, but it is a real one. The 6 January 2021 attack on the United States Capitol included participants who carried Branch Davidian iconography and who explicitly invoked Waco. In 2023, Donald Trump opened his presidential campaign with a rally in Waco on the thirtieth anniversary of the siege — a choice of date and location that, whatever its intent, was understood by his audience and his critics alike as a signal.

Waco did not cause all of this. The currents of American anti-government feeling are older and deeper than any single event. But Waco gave those currents an image — a burning compound, a child’s body recovered from the ruins, a federal tank crashing through a wall — that has proven extraordinarily durable. Every generation since 1993 has, in one way or another, had to decide what to make of those images.

Part Eleven: The Names That Matter

It is a feature of how the Waco story has usually been told that the dead are remembered in aggregate. Seventy-six. Eighty-six counting the earlier deaths. Twenty-five children. The numbers are repeated so often they lose their grip.

Among the federal agents killed on 28 February: Conway LeBleu, 30. Todd McKeehan, 28. Robert Williams, 26. Steven Willis, 32. They were doing the job they had been told to do. They had families. They are buried in four different states.

Among the Branch Davidians who died on 28 February: Winston Blake, 28. Peter Gent, 24. Peter Hipsman, 28. Perry Jones, 64. Michael Schroeder, 29. Jaydean Wendel, 34.

Among those who died in the fire on 19 April: David Koresh, 33, and seventy-five others, from a four-year-old named Chica Jones to a seventy-six-year-old named Catherine Matteson. Twenty-five were children under the age of fifteen. Several were Koresh’s own.

The full list of the dead is a matter of public record. It is worth, sometimes, sitting with the full list rather than the headline figure. The Davidians were people, mostly poor, mostly drawn into a community that promised them meaning and family in a country that had not given them much of either. Many of them died believing they were martyrs in a cosmic battle. They were not. They were people, in a building, on a windy April afternoon in Texas, who did not have to die.

A Final Note

The Mount Carmel property is still there. A small group of Branch Davidians, splintered into factions after Koresh’s death, continued to live on the land for years afterwards. A modest chapel was eventually rebuilt. A driveway lined with crepe myrtles, one tree for each of the dead, runs up to the site. Visitors come — not many, but a steady trickle — to walk the ground and read the small memorial markers.

What lessons American law enforcement took from Waco can be measured, in part, in the absence of subsequent operations like it. The 1996 Freemen standoff in Montana, the 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada, the 2016 Malheur occupation in Oregon — in each, federal agencies showed a markedly different willingness to wait, to negotiate, to let standoffs end without spectacle. Waco taught that lesson, expensively. It was a lesson worth learning. It cost too much.

What lessons American culture took from Waco are harder to measure and probably less encouraging. The conspiracy theories have not faded. The grievance has not subsided. The siege remains, in 2026, an active reference point in domestic politics in ways that the people who died at Mount Carmel — federal agents, mothers, children, the deluded and the manipulated alike — would, one suspects, find astonishing and exhausting in equal measure.

Seventy-six people did not have to die on 19 April 1993. That is the simplest and most important thing to say about Waco. Everything else is commentary.